Welcome to our new season! To celebrate, we’re kicking it up a notch by holding an all-star roundtable of some truly incredible writers. Vajra Chandrasekera, Samantha Mills, and Gregory A. Wilson join us to discuss didactic genre fiction. Is it a skill problem? Is it a media literacy problem? Can you hammer home a message without alienating (sorry/not sorry) your audience?

We're nominated for an Aurora Award for Best Fan-Related Work!

Check out the ballot (and consider casting a vote for us) at the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association.

Show Notes:

• Vajra's website
• Samantha's website
• Gregory's website
• Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein (and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein)
• Dante’s Inferno
• Katabasis, R.F. Kuang
• Rabbit Test, Samantha Mills
• A Sound of Thunder, Ray Bradbury
• Dune, Frank Herbert
• The Witcher, Andrzej Sapkowski
• Le Roman de Silence
• From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain, Minister Faust
• The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
• Island of Doctor Moreau, H.G. Wells
• Star Trek TOS: Let That Be Your Last Battlefield
• One star review of Pride and Prejudice
• World Bank literacy stats
• Grendel, John Gardner

Genre fiction is full of strong, independent women, badass heroines, brave Final Girls, and virginal princesses. Frankly, we’re getting a little sick of it? For our season finale, with us to discuss difficult women is the queen of messy, complicated, and antiheroic female protagonists herself, the legendary Silvia Moreno-Garcia!

1. Silvia's website
2. Silvia's Instagram and Threads
3. Signal To Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (find out why Rachel is correct and all of the Goodreads reviewers are wrong)
4. Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
5. Countess by Susan Palumbo
6. Unknown Number: The High School Catfish

Rachel’s Problematic Faves

1. Bellis Coldwine (The Scar by China Miéville)
2. Baru Cormorant (The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickson)
3. Essun (The Broken Earth by N.K. Jemisin)
4. Catra (She-Ra and the Princesses of Power by Nate Stevenson)

David’s Problematic Faves

1. Morgan Le Fay (Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory)
2. Cersei Lannister (A Song Of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin)
3. Jadis (The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis)

Silvia’s Problematic Faves

1. Eleanor and Theodora (The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson)
2. Constance and Merricat (We Have Always Lived In the Castle by Shirley Jackson)
3. Everything by Tanith Lee
4. Rebecca and Rachel (Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier)
5. Emma Bovary (Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert)

Are they genre? Nah, but we still love them

1. Cass Neary novels by Elizabeth Hand
2. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
3. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
4. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
5. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
6. Washington Square by Henry James
7. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

We are celebrating the 100th anniversary of Amazing Stories Magazine. It started way back in March or April, of 1926, depending on who you ask. With us to talk about the magazine's past, present, and maybe even the next hundred years, are its publishers and editors: Steve Davidson, Kermit Woodall and Lloyd Penney.

Show notes:

1. Amazing Stories Magazine online
2. Wikipedia's entry
3. Galactic Central
4. SF Encyclopedia